Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“To anyone reading this,” Jonas starts.

Ren snatches it out of his hand before he can continue reading, scanning over the words with squinted eyes. He looks up to see Jonas glare at him. “Sorry! Sorry, I got kinda excited. This is cool, right? It’s cool.”

“Just read it,” Clarissa groans, thumping against the wall of the cave as she leans back. “The fire’s gonna run out, otherwise.”

“No way,” Nona interjects. “I put, like, six logs on that thing. It should last half the night.”

“To anyone reading this,” Ren repeats, slightly forcefully, “my name is Alex. I’m sixteen. I go to Camena High School.”

There’s a pause, as everyone glances at each other. “Alex Bush?” Michael supplies helpfully, but Clarissa shakes her head.

“He’s not the pranking type.” She looks at Ren. “That all it says?”

“No, it’s…” Ren looks a little uneasy. “My brother Michael drowned. Do not come to Edwards Island. It’s not safe. Then it signs off, A.”

All eyes slowly turn on Michael. He looks briefly perplexed. “It’s… a common name,” he says. “Anyone could be the drowned Michael.”

“Right,” Ren says. “Except we don’t know any Alex who went to our school and had a brother called Michael. Who drowned.”

“Right,” Michael replies slowly. “Eh. Good prank. Creepy.”

Jonas’ eyes flicker back to the mouth of the cave, where moonlight seems to lazily glint off the sand, lighting up the stacks of rocks they’d stepped past to look at the letter on the ground. A sense of unease clenches at his stomach, weighing him down. He can’t articulate why, but something about this place makes him feel anxious.

He imagines the rocks caving in, trapping them all inside, and shivers. Nobody notices. It’s a fairly cold night.

“Still,” Nona starts, and Jonas is jolted back to the discussion again, “this seems kind of half-hearted for a prank. If you wanted to scare someone into not going to the island, you’d put the letter somewhere we could find it before we arrived here.”

“Exactly!” Ren replies. “Anyway, come on, I wanted to show you this really cool – anyone brought the radio?”

There’s a responding silence from the group.

Ren hesitates. “Wait, nobody – oh, come on. I could’ve sworn I remembered telling someone to bring a pocket radio with them.”

“Why would any of us own a pocket radio?” Clarissa asks, and Ren shrugs in response. He still looks confused as she pushes off of the cave wall and begins to stroll back to the mouth, and the others begin to follow her – Michael first, then Nona, and Jonas hesitates to glance at Ren.

He still looks disappointed, confused, eyebrows drawing together as he thinks back to his past conversations. “Hey,” Jonas starts, interrupting whatever train of thought was cycling through his mind at a mile a minute, “we can come back some time to check out the radio stuff.”

“We might not have to,” Ren replies, and Jonas can almost see a plan knitting itself together in his mind as he talks. He begins to follow Clarissa out of the cave, too, and Jonas falls into step with him, stuffing his hands into his pockets as he walks. “The comm tower – there might be a radio in there.”

“You want to break into a comm tower to steal a radio so you can show us all these creepy signals?” Jonas asks, doubtful.

Ren hesitates for a moment, but just as they reach the entrance to the cave, his eyes lock on the pile of rocks they’re both delicately stepping around and something shifts in his expression. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I do.”

“I still can’t believe the others wouldn’t come with us,” Ren huffs, dodging the bush branches and tall grass to protect what looks like an expensive pair of jeans.

Jonas snickers as Ren daintily sidesteps a spider on the ground, replying, “Yeah, well, your pitch could’ve been better. Less of the yeah, it’s probably locked, yeah, it’s probably a waste of time, yeah, I’m only doing this to hear a couple of ghost radio stations make fun of me. You know?”

“And I thought you were going to take this seriously,” Ren says, voice indignant. Jonas thinks it’s a joke. He can’t quite be sure. “Anyway, the comm tower should be just around – oh.”

“What is it?” Jonas asks, rounding the corner for himself and seeing the very clear problem in front of them. It’s buzzing faintly. It’s painted in yellow DANGER: DO NOT TOUCH signs. Jagged lightning bolt symbols decorate the wires strung up in front of them.

It’s an electric fence. And, perched neatly behind, is the comm tower.

“Well,” Jonas starts, “there goes our plan.”

“Are you serious?” Ren groans, face scrunching up in disappointment as he walks over to the fence. Jonas follows him warily, ready to grab the guy and pull him back if he gets too close. His eyes cast over the area for the possibility of a generator, too, but he can’t seem to see anything.

Only, just as they reach the gate itself, the power flickers. And dies.

Ren jumps back as though he were shocked by the fence nonetheless. “What the hell was that?”

“Uh,” Jonas replies helpfully. They both look at each other briefly, and then their eyes return to the gate. In unison, they take a hesitant step closer. “That,” he continues, “that’s weird, right? That’s weird.”

Hand sticking out automatically, Ren moves to open the gate, and Jonas slaps his hand away. “Ow!”

“You’re just gonna touch it?”

“The power went off!” Ren turns away from the gate and towards Jonas. “You saw the power go off. It, like, crackled. And died. And now none of the lights are on and I can’t hear the buzzing sound that tells you when the electricity’s on and the fence died, dude. This could be our only chance to get through!”

Jonas folds his arms. “And if it switches on again when you’re pulling the gate open?”

“Then tell my mom it was for an awesome, noble cause. Like, uh, saving a baby pigeon. Or something.” Before Jonas can protest, Ren grabs the handle of the gate, pushing the bolt back and tugging it open. It creaks as it moves, carving an arc in the dirt as the bottom of the metal gate drags across the ground.

Ren releases the gate, steps through the new gap in the fence, and says, proudly, “Look. Not dead.” Then, to Jonas’ answering glare, he adds, “Oh, come on, don’t look at me like that. I’m a risk taker, Jonie. I’m a –”

“Jonie?” Jonas’ nose wrinkles as he steps through the open gate, beginning to trek up the path. “You – I’m banning that nickname, like, permanently. Jonie is No-nie. Got it?”

“Fine,” Ren sighs, following him up to the tower. “What do your parents call you as a nickname, then?”

Jonas casts his mind back, heart twisting slightly at the reminder of his mom’s voice – sweet, soft, kind – “Joe,” he replies indifferently. “If they had to shorten it. Which, they didn’t, so I was just Jonas.”

“Okay, Just Jonas.” Ren chuckles to himself at the joke.

Lips pursed irritably, Jonas then shoots back, “I can see why nicknames would be important to you, Reginald.” He grins at Ren’s face when he turns to look at him, seeing the distaste written on the younger man’s features.

“Clarissa always calls me that,” he admits. “It’s like, I told her not to, but she just doesn’t care. She does it anyway. And – like – I love her and all, but it gets tiring.” He scoots around Jonas to grab hold of the ladder first, pulling himself up as Jonas watches him. “Hey, you want funny nicknames? This place is called Harden Tower, and you’ll never guess who it’s named after.”

Chapter Text

“Well,” Jonas says, breaking the silence with a grimace, “Dick Tower’s really living up to its name, huh.” He watches Ren tug on the locked door one last, valiant time, before nudging him aside and kneeling down.

Ren frowns. “Wait – what are you – oh, hell no, Jay Jay.”

“That – that’s objectively worse than Jonie,” Jonas warns him, but his hand stills on the lock nonetheless. “You wanted to break into the tower, I’m breaking into the tower.”

“I wanted to grab a radio to check out the cool signals on the beach!” Ren protests. “Not break into a locked room!” Jonas rocks back on his heels to look at him – properly look at him, and Ren hesitates. “I know stealing a radio is also super illegal and stuff,” he adds, “but we can’t just – we gotta draw a line somewhere. Busting locks is the line I am drawing.”

Jonas straightens up, towering over his new friend and huffing as he does so. “Fine,” he snaps. “But if we walked aaaall the way up here, just so you could –”

“Window!” Ren crows. “Window. There’s a window.” He points, and Jonas squints, just about making out the open window through the dirty glass. He walks across the narrow balcony to inspect it. Ren follows. “Can we get through it?”

“Might need to suck in our stomachs a little,” Jonas replies, already pulling himself up onto the ledge. “But I reckon we can make it inside.” He’s proven correct as he drops down into the tower’s only room, feet hitting the oddly dusty ground beneath him and watching a tiny cloud rise in its wake. Ren follows after, stumbling into Jonas’ back as he hits the ground heavily and chuckles.

“You know, I bet everyone’s gonna be so pissed they missed out on this,” he says, taking a moment to marvel at his successful breaking-and-entering.

Jonas raises an eyebrow. “You think?” he asks, moving over to the drawers to absently tug them out and see if there’s anything interesting inside. “Michael seemed too… you know, law-abiding. And Clarissa didn’t seem up for anything that might get her shirt dirty.”

“Nona’s gonna be pissed, then,” Ren says defensively, copying Jonas’ tactic of rifling through everything as he talks. “And Mike’s not exactly a saint, either. He just wants to keep his record clean.”

“That’s kind of the same thing,” Jonas points out.

Ren grins. “Nuh-uh. If your record’s clean, it’s just ’cause no one was around to see you get dirty.” Jonas groans as Ren winks, pretending not to hear the innuendo and instead pushing the drawer shut. He steps around Ren, then, his hand coming to rest on what looks like a radio. A really, really big radio.

He presses the most obvious button, experimentally. To his surprise, there is a burst of static, and he leans into the receiver interestedly. “Heeello?” he tries, keeping the button pressed down. “Anyone there?”

“Uh, Jonas?” Ren starts nervously, but Jonas doesn’t turn to look at him. “Jonas. The power’s back on for the fence. The whole thing’s lit up like a Christmas tree – it must’ve come back on after we went through.”

Ignoring Ren, Jonas leans in further, wondering if he can almost hear a voice in the static. “Hey, Ren – how do I make this signal, you know, clearer?”

“You… don’t, dude. The entire island’s a dead zone for proper signal. Except, you know,” and Ren huffs a laugh, now, pushing his hand through his neatly-gelled hair, “the mystery ghost signals.”

“Then I think I’m getting one of those,” Jonas replies drily. “You hear that?”

Ren falls silent, as does Jonas, while the static continues to fill the quiet room. Then, he hears it again. A voice. No matter how close he gets, though, he can’t make out what it’s saying. He leans back with a huff and almost hits Ren, who’s made his way over to nudge Jonas aside and start twiddling the knobs on the machine.

“You know what you’re doing?” Jonas asks.

“Nope,” Ren answers, and continues fiddling with the controls. Only, after a moment, something must work – the voice bursts through the static with a harsh crackle that makes them both wince.

The crackling dissolves. Then, still quiet, they begin to hear a robotic voice. “My… name… is… Alex.”

Ren leans back, face twisting. “This again?” he asks. Jonas is still listening to the voice as it slowly, unsteadily recounts the contents of the letter they found earlier on in the cave. The smudged ink they’d carelessly balled up now feels a lot more ominous than it did before.

“It sounds like…” Jonas trails off, trying to find the appropriate description. “Like Siri’s reading something out, you know? Or Google Translate. It’s all, like, stilted. Robotic.”

“Do not come to Edwards Island,” the voice is still saying. “It’s not safe. Alpha.”

Jonas squints. “Alpha?”

When his eyes turn to Ren, his friend’s already cramming his hand into his pocket to pull out the letter they’d found earlier. Jonas didn’t even know Ren kept hold of it. “Yeah,” Ren replies, “alpha. See – the letter signs off with just, A. It’s just reading out the letter.” As he talks, they hear the voice loop back round to, to anyone reading this. Jonas shivers.

They listen to it in silence, neither of them ready to turn the machine off, neither of them ready to talk about what they’re hearing. Jonas’ mind is racing through his options – yes, it could be a prank. Yes, it might be stupid to get nervous about it. No, he isn’t scared.

Yes, this could be one of Ren’s ghost radio stations, and yes, the letter might be from a…

He shakes his head. Blinks. An idea seems to be dancing at the back of his mind, almost like déjà vu, like he knows who did this and if he can think on it for long enough, he’ll realise. But nothing’s coming to him. All he has is this name, repeated, over and over again.

Alex. Alex. Alex. Alpha. Michael. Alex.

Then, the robot’s voice jumps over the word safe, glitching once – glitching twice – stammering over itself and dying monstrously as a voice breaks out over it, drowning it out, desperation in its tone as it gasps, “I’m here!”

Jonas stumbles away from the console. Ren does the same. They both stare at it, mildly horrified.

“Did you…” Ren starts, but then –

“Jonas!”

The voice cuts off abruptly. The room fills with an icy silence as they both remain frozen in place, staring at the console. Jonas’ lips part to say something, anything, but no words come.

Then, the robot’s voice glitches back over.

“My brother Michael drowned,” it continues. “Do not come to Edwards Island. It’s not safe. Alpha.”

Chapter Text

“So, what you’re saying is,” Clarissa starts, “you went all the way over there, and you didn’t even find a radio?”

Jonas drops down onto one of the towels laid out across the thin sand, still feeling shaky from the experience. Ren continues to pace back and forth in front of the fire, on edge, unnerved. At a glance, Jonas can tell Michael is concerned for them – Nona, too, to an extent. Clarissa just has an eyebrow quirked.

“No,” Ren replies emphatically, throwing his arms in the air, “we found a radio, and it started talking to us!”

“Isn’t that what radios are supposed to do?” Nona chimes in, and Ren groans. Michael chuckles.

“Okay, okay,” he says, voice soothing in a tone that Jonas doesn’t doubt he’s had to adopt before around this group of friends. “From the top, Ren, Jonas. What happened? You said you heard something.”

Jonas flicks his thumb and his lighter ignites, the dull taste of ash flooding his lungs a moment later in a way that he’s learned calms him. Lowering the cigarette from his mouth, he exhales, letting the smoke dissipate into the air in front of him and replying, “The radio starting talking to us. It was – it was reading out the, um, the letter we got? From before?”

“The whole, I’m Alex, my brother drowned thing?” Michael asks, and Jonas nods. “Huh.”

“But it was –” He takes another drag from his cigarette, expelling the smoke with a shaky exhale. “It was all robotic. Like, my. Name. Is. Alex. And then this other voice comes on, totally drowning it out, and it said – what was the first thing it said?”

Ren tugs on his shirt collar nervously. “I’m here,” he replies. “It said, I’m here. I think it was, um, in response to you? ’Cause you turned on the radio and asked if anyone was there. And so it was like, I’m here, and then…”

Uncrossing her legs, Nona says lightly, “Come on, spit it out. I’m invested, now!”

“It said my name,” Jonas finishes. He bumps the ash off the end of his cigarette uncomfortably, aware of all these new faces turned to him, staring at him, judging him for being scared – for falling for their prank? He can’t figure it out.

“No, it didn’t,” Ren corrects him, and Jonas turns to him, brow furrowing in confusion, before Ren elaborates, “it yelled it! Like, full-on panicking! It was like, Jonaaas! All terrified and – I don’t know. I don’t know! I do not know what happened.”

“He’s spiralling,” Clarissa remarks, and Michael stands up to grip Ren’s shoulder firmly.

Ren pauses to look at Michael. Michael slowly guides him into sitting down. “Sounds like a fun time,” he says, casually. “Deep breaths, buddy. There we go. That’s it.”

For a long moment, all they can hear are the waves crashing on the beach, the crackling of the fire, and the rustling of the sand underfoot as Michael steps back over to the blanket he was sat on before.

“Okay,” Clarissa says, “Ren? Cool joke.” She actually sounds impressed. “The letter? Getting the new kid to go along with you? That must’ve taken real effort.”

“What?” Ren asks. “Wait – no, I didn’t. I didn’t do this. I swear I didn’t do this.”

Jonas coughs slightly. “Yeah, uh, I didn’t get roped into some prank. I dunno if Ren’s somehow doing this, sure, but I definitely heard voices.” He bumps the ash off his cigarette again.

Clarissa raises a single, perfectly-shaped eyebrow at him. “No way,” she replies eventually, tone monotonous. “Come on. Ren finds a letter in the cave Ren wanted to go to. Ren and Jonas, while the rest of us aren’t there, hear mysterious voices saying Jonas’ name.”

At that moment, the phone in Clarissa’s hand buzzes, and she glances down at it in confusion. “You have signal here?” Nona asks.

She hesitates. “No?”

“Then what was that?”

Clarissa’s frown deepens. “A… text.”

Everyone glances at each other over the fire as she taps the screen to open the text, and she glares at Ren when it loads onto her screen. “This isn’t funny,” she snaps.

“What did it say?” Michael asks, leaning his chin on her shoulder to look at the screen. “Oh, it’s – it’s the message on the letter. The my name is Alex one.”

“Yeah, and Ren somehow texted it to me –”

“On an island with no signal, while you were looking at me!” Ren exclaims. “See? I told you. Something’s going on here, guys, I’m not – we’re not making it up, right, Jonas?”

Before Jonas can reply, Michael butts in. “This one’s different,” he says. “To the original message, I mean. The last one was in all caps. This is like – mostly caps, with a handful of lowercase letters. It almost looks like…”

He pulls out his own phone. “The lowercase letters are – L, I, S, T, E… holy crap.” He glances up, first at Clarissa, then to Ren. “The lowercase letters spell out, listen to Ren.”

There’s a pause.

“Okay,” Clarissa replies evenly. “What the hell.”

“Can it –” Jonas stops himself, clearing his throat, and backtracking. “I’m just gonna say it, because I’m pretty sure we’re all thinking it, but… it kind of sounds like it could be…”

“Don’t say it,” Nona begs.

“…A ghost,” Jonas finishes.

“You had to say it.”

He sighs. “Look – someone had to say it. Weird voices on the radio? Strange letters? Ominous text messages in a place that text messages should not be able to send? I’m not one to jump to the conclusion of haunted whenever something happens, but I don’t exactly feel like this is a jump!” He looks at Clarissa. “What number is texting you?”

“Um,” Clarissa says helpfully, and then clicks on the contact. “It’s blocked. I can’t – I can’t see it.”

Jonas’ gaze flickers back to Nona, and she sighs. “Fine. It’s creepy.” She hesitates. “You… really think it’s a ghost?”

Clarissa’s phone buzzes again, then, and Michael and Clarissa both glance down to read the message. “It’s the same letter again,” Michael says. “But different letters are in lowercase. Hold on, I can –”

“Not a ghost,” Clarissa interrupts. “It says, not a ghost.”

“Well, then, what are you?” Ren snaps, glancing up at the sky as though he expects something to appear.

The group is silent, and Clarissa’s phone is silent too. Again, all sounds return to the wind and the waves, and Nona sighs. “See?” she says. “Whatever this was, it must’ve just…”

Clarissa’s phone buzzes again. She glances down. “Alex,” she says. “It just – everything is uppercase but the word Alex.” The phone buzzes again. “S… I… Sister? So, Alex is a girl.” The phone buzzes again, and Clarissa frowns at it. “This one doesn’t – R, E, D, N…”

“It’s scrambled up, this time,” Michael interjects. “See? It spells friend.”

“Okay,” Jonas says, slightly unnerved, slightly impatient. “You’re a sister and a friend, but what – are you? Like, if you’re not a ghost, why can’t we see you, and why can you only talk to us with this – this letter? Through texts?” He pauses. “Were you the voice on the radio? What’s even –”

“One question at a time, man,” Michael says. He clears his throat. “We’ll start with the first one. If you’re not a ghost, what are you?”

There’s a hefty pause. Then… they all sit up slightly as they hear the phone buzz. “Lost,” Clarissa answers after a moment, reading from the phone screen. “That – Alex? You’re not helping.”

“Were you the voice on the radio?” Jonas asks again.

Buzz. “Yes,” Clarissa reads out. “Okay, uh, my battery’s about to die, so if she could take her whacky-ass ghost business somewhere else, then –”

Jonas’ phone buzzes, and he flinches violently, hesitating before he tugs it out of his pocket. Reading over the message, and plucking out all the lowercase letters, he chuckles. “It says, not a ghost, again.” He coughs at Clarissa’s glare as she stuffs her phone back into her pocket.

“What does she want from us?” Ren asks. Then, “Uh, Alex? Hi. I’m Ren. What do you want from us?”

Jonas already has his screen on when the phone buzzes, and he taps the message, reading out, “I… M… I… S… Huh. That’s weird.”

“What? What is it?” Ren scrambles over to plonk himself on Jonas’ blanket.

“It…” Jonas trails off, and tilts the screen protectively, almost as if to stop Ren from seeing it. “It says, uh. I miss Ren. And,” he continues hastily, as Ren’s eyes widen, “there’s a second text, saying. Uh.”

His eyes flicker back down to the screen nervously, reading over the text again as various members of the group prompt him to keep going.

TO ANYONE reADInG THis,
MY NAME IS ALEX. I’M SIXTEEN. I GO TO CAMENA hIGH SCHOOL. MY BROTHer MICHAeL DROWNED. DO NOT COME TO EDWaRDS ISLAnd. IT’S not SAFE.
-A

“Ren is here and not,” he finishes eventually.

“Not what?” Ren asks.

“I don’t know,” Jonas replies. “Why the hell would I know.” He glances up, just like Ren did before, to ask, “How did you know my name? Why did you call out to me on the radio?”

The blocked number responds swiftly, and Jonas blinks. All it says in lowercase are the words… “My brother?”

“Well, Jonas,” Michael says lightly, leaning back on his blanket, “I guess now’s as good a time as any for you to ’fess up to any secret sisters you have by the name of Alex.”

“Let me think,” Jonas replies sarcastically. “Oh, wait. None.” He glances back down at the screen, then back up at Michael. “Aren’t you supposed to be the one with the secret sister, anyway? My brother Michael. It’s in every single one of these messages.”

Michael chuckles and responds, “Isn’t it, my brother Michael drowned? I don’t think I’ve ever drowned. Wait –” He presses a hand against his chest humorously, patting it down for a brief moment. “Nope. I feel pretty dry right now.”

Clarissa rolls her eyes fondly from beside him.

“Okay,” Nona starts, “uh, Alex? I know – I know we asked what you were, and you said – like, lost, or whatever, but… what does that mean? Where are you and why can’t we see you?”

Jonas’ phone buzzes, and he checks it dutifully. “Another…” He pauses. “It spells out the word another, and then it’s just – letters. Id… idmenisno? I’d men is no?” The phone buzzes, and, despite himself, he snorts. “Try again. Okay, so it’s not ‘I’d men is no’.”

The phone buzzes yet again, and Ren leans in, so close and annoyingly unaware of personal space that Jonas can’t tell if it’s the breeze brushing over his skin or Ren’s breath. “Dimension,” he reads out. “So, another dimension. Wait. Another dimension? How the hell is she –”

Nona scoots over to sit on Jonas’ other side, clearly interested in reading the cryptic texts as they come, just as another appears. “Radio,” Jonas and Nona read out together. Then, Jonas continues, “Alex, what – what does that mean?”

Then… “Not safe.”

Chapter Text

TO ANYONE READING THIS,
mY NaME IS ALEX. I’M SIXTEEN. I gO TO CAMENA HIgH SCHOOL. MY BROTHER MiCHAeL dROWNED. DO NOT COME TO EDWarDS ISlAND. IT’S NOT SAFe.
-A

“Maggie-Darl-E,” Jonas says for the fourth time. “You’re sure this means Maggie Adler?”

He stumbles briefly, skidding down the slanting dirt track and regaining his balance as he jams his foot against a jutting rock. The path back up the hill is somehow still managing to go downhill. He doesn’t question it.

Ren walks ahead of him, and Clarissa, Michael and Nona bring up the rear. The cliff top is windy, the harsh breeze making several attempts to snatch at a hat that Jonas has, in retaliation, tugged further down his head. His fringe is barely visible from beneath the beanie, now. Still, the winds are loud enough that when Ren replies, Jonas has to strain to hear him properly.

“It has to!” he calls back. “Won’t make sense otherwise! Maggie dies three days ago and now there’s a ghost?”

“And to think,” Clarissa says monotonously, “I just thought we were gonna get drunk and go skinny dipping. No. Now we’re ghostbusting.”

Arm curling around her shoulders warmly, Michael replies, “Come on, babe. You gotta admit there’s something pretty weird happening. It’ll be fun to check it out.” His voice has an edge to it that Jonas still hears over the breeze, something that tells Clarissa to humour Ren and his friend, they’re having fun. Even after everything, he doubts there’s anything supernatural going on.

Jonas stuffs his hands into his pockets irritably, but has to pull them out a moment later to give Ren a boost over the fence. He hasn’t received a message from Alex in ten, fifteen minutes. It scares him. Bizarrely, he finds himself wondering if she’s okay.

As they land the other side of the fence, Nona yelps, and Jonas turns around to see her picking up a ball of paper from the ground.

“This thing just hit me in the head,” she says. “From – nowhere. Nobody threw it.”

“Maybe the ghost threw it,” Clarissa jokes.

Nona presses her lips together firmly, clearly unamused as she opens the scrunched-up paper ball. “I’m serious, Clarissa. It hit me. And – oh, it’s another one of those letters. Like the one in the cave.”

“What’s it say?” Ren asks.

She takes her time reading over it, eyebrows drawing together in concern. “It – it says…” She looks up at them, and then back down to the paper in her hand to read the words out. “To Edwards Island? Your original name is… Abnaki. You are thirty million years old. You live in the Pacific Ocean. Your caretakers died by military warfare.” She squints, slightly. “Do not let Alex come. It’s not safe. A.”

Almost as soon as the last of the letter’s message leaves Nona’s mouth, Jonas feels his phone vibrate. He tugs it out quickly, eyes skimming over the words he’s received to find the lowercase letters before he realises what the text itself actually is.

“Holy crap,” he says. “That – that message, it just came through on my phone, like the other one.”

TO EDWARDS ISLAND,
youR ORIGINAL NAME IS ABNAkI. YOU ARE 30 MILLIOn YEARS oLD. YOU LIVE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN. YOUR CARETAKERS DIED BY MILITARY wARFARE. DO NOT LET ALEX COme. IT'S NOT SAFE.
- A

“What does it say?” asks Michael. “Does it… say anything?”

“You know me,” Jonas replies.

Michael laughs nervously, the hand not draped around Clarissa’s shoulders reaching up to rub his neck awkwardly. “Uh, not that well, dude. And not well enough to read your mind, so what does the message say?”

“No, it –” Jonas feels himself pinken slightly. “That’s what the message says. You know me.”

“Well, that’s appropriately creepy,” Ren says in the silence that follows, and after the group hums their agreement, they continue walking down the path towards the town. Glancing back, Jonas sees Nona fold the letter that was thrown at her, in half and then half again, smoothing out the creases and tucking it carefully into her pocket.

“You guys wait out here,” Ren starts, and everyone ignores him, filing into the parks office as though they both owned and lived inside the building. His half-hearted attempts to stop his friends were in vain, as even Jonas steps around him, huffing a laugh at the hurt-puppy look on his face. It’s soon masked by a more irritated expression, which soon melts into resignation, as he amends his instructions: “Just don’t break anything.”

Breaking into the office was easy – the door was locked, but Jonas didn’t even need to pull out anything to pick the lock with, as Michael pointed out that the thing looked fragile enough to simply bust open. Strangely, Nona insisted on being one of the ones to put her back into it, as she’d said, and she shoved the door open with Michael to tumble inside.

Why Ren thought they’d then leave him to go through everything alone, Jonas doesn’t quite understand. He can’t be bothered to ask, though, and heads inside the building to poke around at the stuff inside with the others.

“Allison actually works here?” Clarissa asks, leafing through some files left atop a desk disinterestedly.

“Uh, yeah, so don’t – like – touch anything you don’t need to.” Ren takes the papers from her hand, putting them back down on the desk and trying to rearrange the objects on the desk’s surface to look as though nothing had been disturbed.

Nona giggles. “Ren, we just broke down the door. I think people are gonna notice we were here.”

“No,” Ren replies, clearly slightly stressed, “they’re gonna notice someone was here. The moment you start picking up stuff unnecessarily, they’re gonna notice our fingerprints were here.”

Ren’s comment makes Jonas pause, his hand outstretched to a box on top of the other desk in the front room. He thinks for a moment before pulling off his beanie, sticking his hand in it, and then opening the box with his improvised glove.

“Wow, Jonas, that hat hair is really –”

Jonas cuts off whatever comment Clarissa was about to make as he picks up the handheld radio inside the box. “Radio!” He turns to face the others. “One of Alex’s texts was just, radio. Maybe this is why she wanted us to get into Maggie Adler’s house.”

The discomfort is etched into everyone’s faces. Creepy ghost texts are one thing, but apparently creepy ghost texts that can predict where pocket radios are stored are something else.

“She didn’t actually say that she wanted us to go to Maggie’s house,” Ren says. “Technically, all she said was Maggie Adler. We kinda made the jump ourselves, there.”

“Technically,” Jonas replies, “all she said was Maggie Darle.”

Ren huffs a half-hearted shut up before stepping over to Jonas, carefully taking the radio from him by pushing his hand into Jonas’ beanie alongside his own. “I want my hat back at some point,” Jonas starts, but Ren shushes him again as his attention turns to the radio itself.

“Hey – I got it. The radio is the key to get into Maggie’s house. See – WAL radio. Wave Assisted Lock.” Ren turns the radio to face Jonas, pointing out the tiny letters inscribed into it. “So, frequency unlocks stuff, instead of an actual key. It’s kind of like a thumbprint. Or an eye scan. If you have the radio, and the radio can reach the frequency, you can get inside.”

“Huh.” Jonas takes the radio back with his free hand, not bothering to cover it with the beanie first. He does snatch the beanie off of Ren a moment later to tug it back over his messy hair, though, ignoring Ren’s protest to fiddle with the radio dial.

For some inexplicable reason, Jonas’ chest feels tight as he holds the radio. It’s not dissimilar to the feeling he gets when he catches the flash of his mom’s ring from his necklace – a sense of belonging, remembering, mourning. Regardless, the tightness quickly folded into anxiety when Ren took the radio. He doesn’t know why. He just feels like it ought to be his.

Before he can think on it, Ren is talking again. “Hey,” he starts, hand reaching up to pluck Jonas’ beanie off his head again – Jonas doesn’t even say anything, just makes a disgruntled noise – and wrap it around his fingers so he can reach back into the box, “there’s more. Personal Effects of Margaret Dorothy Adler. This is all her old stuff.”

“Why’s it here?” Michael asks. His gaze moves from Ren to Jonas, who gives an answering half-shrug when Ren says nothing.

“To whom it may – oh. Wow.”

Jonas leans in. “What?” he asks, and as Ren begins to read the letter properly, his eyes skim over it.

To whom it should concern,
This island, and its history, is a lie. I have been compelled by both forces outside my control and my own willful concern for the safety of others to conceal the many truths aboutDO NOT COME TO EDWARDS ISLAND. IT’S NOT SAFE.
- M

Chapter Text

“Alex isn’t responding,” Jonas says, tucking his phone away with a sigh. “She hasn’t said anything for, like, an hour.” His nails tap nervously on the radio’s plastic case, a fast-paced rhythm as he pretends he isn’t scared – not of her, though. For her. Scared for a ghost he met a few hours back when she spam-texted them with eerie messages featuring hidden codes.

Not a ghost, his mind supplies for him. Despite himself, his lip twitches at the memory.

A moment later, Jonas gives up on ignoring the urge to light a cigarette to ease his nerves, and pulls one out. He knows Ren was saying something about a brownie earlier – if the example being set is to turn to drugs to avoid thinking about their current situation too much, then Jonas is happy to follow suit in his own way.

They returned to the beach around half an hour ago – the office was grey, and dim, and altogether creepy, and hanging out in the tiny town of four stores wasn’t doing anyone’s paranoia any good. Clarissa took a beer from the cooler, and then she took another, and then Michael and Nona joined in, and – despite everything they just saw and heard, they’re slowly tipping back into the night’s original plan. Get drunk. Get high. Have a couple of vaguely interesting conversations. Stare at the fire. Pretend they’re not scared. Get hungry, and then politely turn down Ren’s offer of a brownie. Get drunk. Stay scared.

And, in Jonas’ case, look for a signal that doesn’t exist on a phone with no new texts.

All through the silence, something is itching at the back of his mind – a memory he can’t quite remember, a story he can’t quite tell. He doesn’t know Alex; hell, he’s only been in town a handful of days. How would he know anything about Camena High’s current or former students? No Alex comes to mind, except for the one who does, the one who lingers in a part of his subconscious he can only see shining through the gap at the bottom of the locked door.

Breaking into Maggie Adler’s house had seemed like the wrong idea. They’d asked Alex if that was what she wanted them to do, and she never answered, so they dropped it. Jonas took the radio, promising to return it in the morning before they leave the island. Michael looked away.

That’s the thing – whatever this connection is between him and Alex, between him and non-existent non-memories of Alex, between him and the cloud of imagination that surrounds the concept of Alex, he feels like Michael has it too. What are you? Sister. My brother Michael drowned.

He doesn’t ask Michael, and Michael doesn’t answer.

“Alex,” he murmurs, when the music blasting from Nona’s phone is loud enough to drown out his quiet voice to the others, when he’s lying on his back and staring up at the stars, when his exhale is smoky and his trembling, cold finger taps off the ash at the end of his cigarette, “you there?”

Almost instantaneously, his phone buzzes. He scrambles to unlock it and read the message.

TO EDWARDS iSlAND,
YoUR ORIGINAL NAME IS ABNAKI. YOU ARE 30 MILLION YEARS OLD. YOU LIve IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN. youR CARETAKERS DIED BY MILITARY WARFARE. DO NOT LET ALEX COME. IT'S NOT SAFE.
- A

His stomach knots. “I love you,” he reads out quietly, confused. His gaze flickers to the others – Nona laughing at something Ren just said, Clarissa and Michael leaning heavily on each other on their shared blanket – and decides this message isn’t worth interrupting them. He doesn’t want to give it to them.

“How do I help you?” he asks. Truth be told, he isn’t sure why he asks that particular question at that particular moment, but it feels like the right time – whoever Alex is, she doesn’t love him. She just needs him. She can’t love him.

The text buzzes through.

TO EDWARDS ISLAND,
youR ORIGINAL NAME IS ABNAKI. YOU ARE 30 MILLION YEARS OLD. YOU LIVE IN THE PAcIFIC OCEan. YOUR CAREtAKERS DIED BY MILITARY WARFARE. DO NOT LET ALEX COME. IT'S NOT SAFE.
- A

“What do you mean, I can’t?” Jonas pushes himself up onto his elbow, glaring at the screen. “How do you know? If I can’t help, why are you contacting me? What do you want me to do?”

TO EDWARDS ISLAND,
youR ORIGINAL NAME IS ABNAKI. YOU ARE 30 MILLION YEARS OLD. YOU LIVE IN tHE PACIFIC OCEAN. YOUr CARETAKERS Died BY MILItARY WARFARE. Do NOT LET ALEX COME. IT'S NOT SAFE.
- A

“You tried to,” Jonas reads out quietly, adjusting his hat as his eyes scan over the text. That makes no sense. Still, before he can respond to the text properly, another one pops up on the screen. He quietly reads over the letters – E, A, V, C – before his mind eventually rearranges them into cave.

He glances to the cave.

The ball of paper is coasting along the beach, sailing on the breeze that tosses grains of sand up and at Jonas, and as it rolls under the fence towards him, he stands up to grab it. The music doesn’t stop, but the volume lowers, as the other members of the group call out to him.

“Where are you going, buddy?” Ren shouts, as Jonas makes his way over to the balled-up paper. He bends down and picks it up while everyone else watches – Nona standing to her feet, Ren rising up onto his knees – and unfolds it delicately, making sure not to rip the crumpled edges, while walking back to them.

“It’s another letter,” he says. “Alex texted to say – to say, um, cave. So I looked over, and this was… anyway.” He clears his throat and looks down at the piece of paper in his hands. “To anyone,” he starts reading. “My name is Alex. I’m sixteen. I go to Camena High School.” His voice betrays his disappointment – the letter seems to be the same as the first one they found.

Until…

“My brother Jonas is not himself,” he continues, brow furrowing, lip curling in confusion. “Do not come to Edwards Island. It’s not safe.” Jonas stares at the piece of paper for a long time, before finally signing off, “A.”

Nobody talks for a long moment. Wisely, Nona switches off the music.

“I think,” Jonas starts, hesitant, “we should maybe start considering the possibility that Michael was…” His eyes turn to the oldest member of their group. “You know. Michael.”

Michael raises his eyebrows at him. “And consider – what, that I drowned?” He pulls his jacket around himself then, slightly, the red one that almost matches Clarissa’s hair. The thought seems to make him uncomfortable – not that Jonas can blame him. His own personal message isn’t exactly a positive one, either, and Michael remembers it. “And that you’re… not yourself.”

“Maybe we should consider that this is all still a really elaborate prank,” Clarissa butts in, before Jonas’ phone vibrates again.

He pulls it out. It vibrates a second time, and then a third, and then again, sending through a stream of messages while he’s tapping in the password to unlock it. He squints at the texts he just received. “They’re all still the Edwards Island Abnaki letter,” he tells the others, before translating the hidden messages. “Your present is. The first one says, your present is. The second one… my past. Then it switches to the newest letter – the, uh, Jonas one. It says… my Jonas is not. Then the next one is, um…” He pauses, trying to decipher it. “It’s the Abnaki one, again, and it says… you anymore.”

He looks up at the others. “Your present is my past. My Jonas is not you, anymore.”

Chapter Text

A few minutes later, Jonas gets a text. While Ren insists they have to take Maggie Adler’s boat and escape the island, and Clarissa tries to find every logical explanation for everything they’ve experienced so far – it’s a prank, Ren, shut up – he unlocks his phone and reads it. It’s the letter that begins dear Edwards Island again, and as he scans through the lowercase letters, he realises it spells seventytwo.

“Seventy-two,” he says out loud, pausing Ren and Clarissa in their arguing. Nona and Michael look grateful for the distraction. “I got another text from Alex, and it says… seventy-two. Any ideas what that could be about?”

There’s a pause. “Coordinates?” asks Nona.

“You’d need more than two numbers,” replies Ren, before making a soft a-ha noise and dropping down to pick up the radio, discarded on the blanket. “It could mean a station. Like with the weird anomaly signals – hold on…”

He fiddles with the radio, frowning at it, before the buzzing static coming from the receiver fades into… “Hello?” says a voice. The voice from earlier, from the radio at Harden Tower. “Testing, testing. Jonas, come on.”

Immediately, Jonas snatches the radio from Ren, holding it up to his face. “Alex?” he asks. “Alex, I’m here. It’s Jonas.”

“Dude,” Ren hisses, “she won’t be able to hear you. It’s not a walkie talkie, you complete –”

“Jonas?” Alex responds, and all five of them freeze. “Oh, thank god. Wait. Are you… the Jonas? The real one?”

Jonas frowns. “As opposed to…”

“Do you feel like you’ve been here before?” she asks, voice slightly rushed. “On the island, I mean. Running through the same night, you know, like – a night you’ve been through before.”

“Uh, no. Should I?”

There’s a delighted peal of laughter from the radio, and Ren stares at it, wide-eyed, as Alex continues. “Oh my god, you have no idea how long I’ve wanted to hear that. Okay. I don’t have long. They’re gonna cut me off when they realise what I’m doing.”

“Who’s gonna cut you off?” Jonas asks.

Alex hesitates. “I can’t – I can’t tell you that,” she admits. “Or you’d totally start looking into it. It’s easier if you just – you need to leave. That’s why I’m here. I know there’s no ferry but you need to get Maggie Adler’s boat and drive away from the island. Got it?”

“What?”

“And whatever happens,” Alex continues, words spilling out of her mouth like a waterfall, “don’t go into the cave. If you see any green triangles, just ignore them. And – when we’re done, destroy this radio. I’m serious.”

Jonas feels his heart pounding against his ribcage. “How do we get you out?”

“Do you remember me?” Something in her voice wobbles, then, but she pushes through it.

He feels guilty. “Not… no. I don’t know who you are.”

“Even after I passed on my little autobiography?” she jokes. At his pause, she explains, “I mean the – the letter. My name is Alex, I’m sixteen, yada yada…”

“Oh!” He laughs, rubbing his neck awkwardly. “Yeah, okay, I know that much. Kind of difficult not to, by this point. But I don’t… I don’t know what you expect me to remember.” His eyes dart to the others around him, and then he takes a deep breath, adding, “But I feel like I’m supposed to remember something.”

A low buzz of static begins to filter through the radio. “Yeah,” Alex says, somewhat defeatedly. “I guess that’s enough.” Before he can reply, she asks, “Does Michael have the – the red jacket?”

Jonas’ eyes dart to Michael. He looks nervous. “Yeah,” Jonas responds. “He does. Why?”

There’s a huff from Alex’s end. “He needs it more than I do.”

A sharp burst of static pushes through the tinny speaker, and Jonas jolts back from it, wincing. “Alex, what the hell was that?” he asks, rubbing his ear uneasily.

“Are you… the Jonas? The real one?” Alex asks, in exactly the same tone as she did before. Then, “Wait – crap, we’ve done this before, haven’t we. It’ll come to me. Just… take Ren, take Nona, take Clarissa and Michael and get off the island.”

Jonas swallows. “You said you were in another dimension,” he says. “Were you… Alex, what’s going on? What are we supposed to remember about you? About the island?”

There’s a crackly sigh. “I – I need you to get to morning without opening a rift,” Alex explains. “I don’t know how long that’ll take for me. But, it’ll… kill me. Permanently.”

“That’s… so messed up,” Nona says slowly.

“It’s what I want, Nona,” the radio replies, and Nona blinks in surprise at the response. “I… god, I’ve been trapped here for years. You don’t know what it’s like. And if you can just live it out until morning without ruining anything, it’ll end.” She pauses, then quietly says, “Trust me. Any end is better than no end.”

“That’s the only way we can help you?” Jonas asks.

“I dunno,” Alex replies truthfully. “I don’t even know if this’ll work. But it’s the only option I have right now. It took me – jeez, decades, to get to this point.” Her voice cracks. “I can’t wait any longer than I have to.”

Jonas drops down onto his blanket, unsure of how to respond to that. “Do you…” he starts, unsure of what to say. “Wanna, um, talk about it?”

Hesitation. Pause. For a long moment, all he hears is the slow, steady crescendo of the static in the background. Then, she replies in a fragile, splintering voice, “Can I… talk to Michael?”

Again, Jonas glances at Michael from across the fire. At his nod, he tosses the radio over the flames, expertly landing in Michael’s waiting hand on the other side. “Hello, uh, Alex?” Michael tries. “It’s Michael, here.”

To everyone’s surprise, Alex’s voice sounds thicker when she next talks. Tearful. “I missed you. Shit, I – I missed you so much.” He blinks, perplexed, and she continues, “The flashbacks stopped coming a while ago. I haven’t seen you in – what, ten, twelve loops? I used to see you every time. You, me. Clarissa was there.”

Alex rambles about something Michael doesn’t remember. Clarissa sits up.

“And you – I know you don’t remember me. I know.” Whoever is standing on the other side of the radio, she’s crying, now, desperately trying to sound as though she isn’t. It’s a sound Jonas knows well. “But – can you just… pretend?”

“Sure,” Michael replies comfortingly, though his expression looks anything but comforted. “I’m your brother, right?”

All Jonas can think is, this guy has one hell of a bedside manner.

“Yeah. And there was this – this memory I kept going back to. You and me, walking up the hill to the Sentry. You were talking about your history project. Then you told me you were thinking about leaving the state.” There’s no doubt about the tears, now. None of them need to see her to know she’s crying. “And there was another. You, and me, and Clarissa. At the beach. You’d left your phone on the ferry, and I talked to Clarissa for a while, and she and I talked about you. You said you loved me. You said…”

“Hey,” Michael says, softly, thumb massaging the back of Clarissa’s hand as he talks. “Slow down, okay? I –” His lips twist, slightly, as he pretends not to be moved at this raw display of emotion from Alex. “I love you.”

His eyes fall to his lap when he hears her sob. Jonas wants to look away, but he can’t. He doubts he’s the only one.

“I love you,” Alex says, “I love you, I love you, I’m sorry – I’m sorry for everything – for Horn Lake, for not saving you, I…” She hiccups. “If I’m not there, you get to live. Pretty picture-perfect ending, huh?” Michael hesitates, and in the silence, Alex continues. “I – can Jonas hear me?”

“Yeah,” Michael whispers, “Jonas can hear you.”

There’s a shaky breath from the speaker. “Jonas,” she starts, “make better memories with these guys than we ever had. You’re a good guy. You deserve them. It’s what your mom would want.”

The words are like a punch to the gut, but Alex is still talking. “And – quit smoking at some point, okay? And I’m sorry I’m not there to help you, or – or be a good sister, or stop you from bickering with Ren over Nona – because, newsflash, guys, you both have a thing for Nona – but these are good people, Jonas. They’re good friends. Keep them.”

Silence hovers in the air around them for a moment. Alex takes a deep breath.

“Get off the island,” she says. “I don’t exist anymore for you. I’m okay with that. Like I said, stay away from any green triangles that are – like, hovering in the air. Those open the portals that get us into this mess. Well – me, at least.” She pauses. “Just… get out. Please.”

“Okay,” Michael says, and it seems as though he says it to appease her more than anything – wrathful spirit of a non-existent sister that she is, he bows down to her. “Okay, we will.”

“Thanks,” she replies. “Thank you. And, Michael, I love—”

The radio erupts into static and they all flinch, staring at it. Michael flips the switch off and then back on, but it’s still fuzzy, and so he fiddles with the dial until the static recedes. By the time he tunes back into the station, Alex is gone.

“Nice. Try. Brave. Girl. Selfless. Girl.”

Up at the top of Harden Tower, the radio taunts Alex. Its robotic, ghostly voice echoes around her, mimicking the voice she’d used, reading out the letters she’d written, mocking her for thinking she could leave.

Alex presses her forehead to the console, and cries.

Chapter Text

“Well,” Michael starts, nervous, “at least we have some confirmation that Ren likes Nona, now, right?” Clarissa elbows him and he shrugs with one shoulder, hand still tightly gripping the radio. “Just trying to lighten the mood.”

“That –” Ren’s cheeks flush. “That wasn’t a confirmation, it was just… she said it about Jonas, too!”

Despite chuckling in response, it’s clear to everyone that Michael is still deeply unnerved by the experience he just went through. It’s Clarissa’s turn to loop a comforting arm around his waist, pulling him in until his temple presses against her shoulder. “Okay,” she relents. “So, maybe, this isn’t just a prank. And maybe we should think about finding the keys to that boat.”

“Who says it’s gonna need keys?” Nona asks. “Don’t you just – sit in them, and hold oars, and…” She makes a rowing motion with her arms for a few seconds before dropping her hands. “That doesn’t need keys.”

“Have you seen the Adler estate? It’s a freaking mansion. If she has a boat, like this Alex said she does, it’s gonna be a nice boat. Nice boats need keys, so don’t get your hopes up.”

Jonas stands up. “Hey, Michael,” he says, voice slightly flat. “Can I get that radio?”

Michael throws it back over the dwindling fire at him, and he catches it easily. Stuffing it into his pocket, he pulls out his phone instead. No new messages. Not long left in his battery. He sighs.

The phone is pushed back into his pocket. The radio is pulled back out. Jonas turns towards the dark, gaping mouth of the cave, looking about ready to swallow him whole if he sets foot inside. He gulps, and starts walking to it.

“Jonas!” Ren calls. “Dude, what’re you – what’re you doing.” Jonas stops in his tracks, glancing behind him, and Ren adds, “The one thing Alex said was to not go into the cave. And, uh, something about green triangles, but I super did not get that, so –”

“Alex said,” Jonas interrupts, “that she opened a portal that got her stuck in this other dimension by… it was something about the cave, and the radio. That’s all I know. That’s really all I’ve got to go on.”

“So,” Nona starts slowly, “your plan is to… do everything she told you not to do?”

Jonas nods jerkily. “I – I can’t just leave her,” he says. “I dunno, alright? I feel like I know her and I feel like if I knew why I knew her, I wouldn’t just leave her behind. To die. To – stop existing.” He looks back at the cave. “If I can open the portal she opened, maybe I can pull her back through.”

“Or maybe you’ll ruin it,” Clarissa says pointedly. “She said she wanted you to leave her alone so she could die. It’s not exactly a decision you make easily.”

“Yeah, and she’s been trapped in there for years with no way out,” Jonas snaps. “I just – I know she doesn’t want this. She’s doing it to protect us, she’s doing it because she thinks it’s the only way out, but – but what if it’s not, huh?”

“And what if it is?” Nona replies, widened eyes glinting in the light of the fire.

Fingers pinching the bridge of his nose, Jonas sighs. His hand then wipes down his face. “I’m going,” he says. “It’s connected. I know it is. The radio, the portal, the cave. If you don’t wanna come, then don’t. I’m totally fine with that. You guys don’t even know me.” He hesitates. “You can go – look for the boat, and if this doesn’t work, I’ll… come with you. I just need to try.”

He turns, then, refusing to let them delay him any longer and marching across the sand. His phone buzzes. He doesn’t check it.

Then, just as he reaches the fence, hand landing on it to help pull himself up and over it, Ren calls out. “Wait,” he shouts, standing up. “Wait, Jonas, don’t – don’t go.”

Teeth gritted, Jonas turns away from the fence, angrily calling back, “For the last time, Ren, I’m not changing my mind –”

“I know!” Ren butts in. He starts hurriedly making his own way across the beach. “I know. I just… need you to boost me over the fence before you go.”

There’s a pause between them as Ren skids to a halt in front of him. Then, Jonas grins. “That,” he says, “I can do.” He kneels down, hands lacing in front of him as Ren presses his foot firmly into the cradle and jumps up. Jonas rises with him, pushing him over and watching him land the other side. Then, with one last, brief glance back to the others sat at the campfire, Jonas grabs onto the fence and hauls himself up and over.

“This place is spooky,” Ren says, and his voice echoes around them as Jonas tugs his lip between his teeth in concentration. He doesn’t disagree with Ren, but he also doesn’t answer him, as they had plenty of opportunities to say that before they found themselves halfway through climbing down a precarious rock wall. “Real spooky,” Ren continues, and Jonas’ foot skids on the ledge he’d hesitantly pressed down on.

He groans quietly. “Yes, it’s creepy, now can we stop with the distractions?” he asks. “I’m trying not to die, here.”

“Well,” Ren replies, dragging the word out, “I’m not too sure about that. You are knee-deep in a conventional ghost story, the male protagonist here to save the damsel in distress… there is still time for a tear-jerker ending.” He chuckles to himself, as though he hadn’t just insinuated Jonas is about to get himself killed, and adds, “Although, as Alex would say, the girl is more likely to be the one who dies at the –”

“Holy crap,” Jonas interrupts. “Ren, did you hear yourself just then?”

He can almost hear Ren’s confused blink from above him, and as he keeps moving down the wall, eventually, he hears Ren reply, “Oh! Alex! I – did I just remember that?”

“It must be something to do with getting closer to where the portal opened up,” Jonas muses. “Or… you know, something about the cave. Or something about it getting closer to the morning. Or – something.”

“Wiser words have never been spoken, my friend.”

Jonas reaches a point on the rock face where he decides he can jump down, and he does so, landing heavily on the cave floor below. Ren drops down beside him a few moments later, and clicks on his flashlight, aiming the light at the path in front of them. “Seen any green triangles?” he asks.

“Not yet,” Jonas replies. “I’m just hoping that whatever they are, they’re obvious.”

His phone buzzes again, and he continues to ignore it. This time, Ren is close enough and their surroundings are quiet enough that he hears it, and he glances curiously at Jonas as they begin to walk carefully through the rocky area. “You’re not gonna check to see what she’s saying?”

Jonas huffs a sigh into the silence. “It’s either gonna be Jonas, stop, or you’re an idiot, or let me die, I’m the selfless hero blah blah blah.” He pauses as he ducks under a particularly sharp stalactite. “It’s weird, how I know this. How I know her. It’s like – I don’t even remember her as a person. More like a character from a TV show I watched as a kid, or something. I don’t even know what she looks like, but she was definitely the one with the nerve to jump over a chasm without even blinking. You know how weird it is to remember and not remember someone at the exact same time?”

“Yeah,” Ren replies, “yeah, I’m getting that. Like, she’d get all indignant about the female characters dying in the movies. I think. And she had a comic book collection and a bunch of stuffed animals under her bed. I don’t even know what her bed looks like, but the stuffed toys sure are there. Were there. I dunno.”

The cave opens out into a wider area, the rock stretching alongside what looks like an underground lake. Jonas passes some graffiti that means nothing to him, while Ren stops to read it out loud, and then their attention falls on an old, battered armoire perched in the corner. There’s another graffitied wall on the other side of the open space, a partner to the original phrase, saw the man, not the dog. Jonas still has no idea what it means.

He stops, in the middle of the cave, and stares up at the green triangle in the air. It’s floating – actually, it seems to just be made of pure light, so that’s not entirely surprising. It’s spinning, too, slowly and steadily, a beacon to entice him in and hypnotise him where he stands.

“This feels wrong,” Jonas says, for no reason other than the pressure on his chest begging to be released. “Like, we should’ve already been here. We should’ve already done this.”

“Maybe that’s what happened before?” Ren asks, hopping down from the rock he’s perched on. “When Alex got stuck? She started here and then everything happened?”

“Maybe,” Jonas agrees, voice low. “But the question is… what is the everything that happened?”

Ren arrives at his side. “You know, I think we’re about to find out.” He glances around the room, briefly, eyes lingering clearly on the fractal in the sky, before he looks back at Jonas. “So,” he continues, “cave, check. Green triangle, check. Portal… not yet. Radio?”

“Check,” Jonas replies, lifting the device in his hand. Ren gives him a thumbs-up, and Jonas switches the radio on, fumbling with the dial for a moment before turning it back to a familiar station. He has no idea what he’s looking for, or what will happen, but he does know that Alex contacted him on station seventy-two. Well, his mind supplies, seventy-two-point-oh.

He reaches 75.4 when the static begins to churn into something more sinister. A quick glance to Ren tells him to keep going, that if he drops it now he might never pick it up, so he pushes on. 75. 74. 73.

72.

The triangle, for want of a better word, explodes. Jonas shouts, stumbling back, his hand leaving the radio dial to grab onto Ren’s arm. Ren clings back as the triangle reclaims its form, but ugly, now, grotesque and pulsating and emitting a dog-whistle shriek that fills up Jonas’ entire mind. He can’t hear. He can’t think. He can’t breathe.

His hand scrambles to push the dial off of the station, a reflexive, panicking move, to stop this agony from curling around his brain and twisting and clenching, but somehow it only strengthens it. The radio’s case feels hot in his hand, too hot, burning hot – he wonders if it’ll melt against his grip, if the sizzling he can hear is his own skin, and then he stops wondering at all because the frequency rises and he feels himself rising with it, Ren lost among a myriad of thoughts all shoving into his mind against his will –

He drops onto the cave floor, hard, grunting in pain as his head smacks against the rock, and the cacophony falls silent.

No. Not silent. There’s a sound, constant, ringing in his ears as he feels his own vision begin to glitch out. “Ren?” he asks into the empty cave—

It’s not empty. Ren is there, beside him, on the ground. His eyes are wide and his chest is heaving. As Jonas looks at him, he feels a wet sensation, trickling down his temple from where he hit his head. A grimace. Now isn’t the time for blood.

He rolls onto his back, jaw clenched, propped up on his elbow while his other hand grips the radio still. There are no burns. There is no melted plastic. Everything is intact, except for the gash on his forehead and the gash in time and space currently hovering above him.

“Great,” he mutters, and Ren shifts beside him to look up as well. “It’s a bigger, greener triangle.”

Chapter Text

Whatever this dimensional portal is, it’s creepy. Jonas can’t quite focus on the picture of the other side – a murky green, like a forest lake that’s overrun with moss or a photograph viewed through the curved glass of a wine bottle. His head is already pounding with an ache that aspirin would not be able to tackle by itself, but every time he tries to look directly at it, the nausea worsens.

“Oh.” A voice, from the void above, crackling and robotic like the letter read out over the radio earlier that night. “It’s. You.” The voice pauses, echoing slightly in the cave’s hollow passage. “Wrong. One. Try. Again.”

Jonas pushes himself to his feet, ignoring the fact that gravity itself seems to weigh twice as much on him, now. He looks over to see Ren still on the floor, and leaves him there for now. “Wrong one?” he asks, still clutching the radio.

“We. Prefer. The. Girl.” The voice – voices? It sounds like multiple people, robots, all at once, in a tuneless harmony, rolling off a wavelength that shouldn’t exist –  hesitates, again. “We. Don’t. Need. You.”

“Well,” Jonas replies, jamming his hand into his pocket nervously, “good. I don’t need you, either.” The courage is bubbling up from somewhere deep inside him, that despite the short breaths and sweaty palms, he still rolls his shoulders back and glares up at the void. “I’m here for Alex.”

“Blue. Hair.” That’s right, Jonas thinks. Blue hair. This new information slots neatly into the puzzle of everything he thinks he ought to remember. “Strong. Will.”

Only, before Jonas can respond to this, the voices glitch, and the whole world seems to glitch with them. There is a different voice, this time. A friendlier one. “Do you wanna play a game?” it asks, sounding exactly like some early Cold War television commercial voiceover.

Again, braver than he could have imagined himself to be, Jonas replies, “Wow, the Saw franchise has really gone downhill.”

Alex laughs at that.

Alex laughs at that?

Jonas looks down at his radio. The dial has turned itself back to station 72.0, and from it, he hears Alex, alive and real and only a moment – a dimension, multiple dimensions – away. “Alex?” he asks, and this time, Ren stands up, shirt dirtied and hand holding onto Jonas’ shoulder while he talks. “Alex, the portal’s open. Just come through. You can –”

“No,” she interrupts. “I can’t.”

“No!” says the voice from before, the Jigsaw in this horror movie, too bright and bubbly for the death penalty it’s sentencing as it talks. “She really can’t!”

Jonas sucks in a sharp breath. “I call bullshit.”

The void replies, in his voice, “I call bullshit.” He jerks back in shock.

Alex’s voice is quieter, duller, than it was before. “I remember us talking,” she says tiredly, “you, know, before. When I got to tell Michael I loved him to his face. When I told you all to take the boat and leave.”

“What do you mean, you remember?” Jonas asks. “It – it only happened, like, twenty minutes ago. Half an hour, tops.”

He’s met with silence for a long time, before the void replies, “Over. And. Over. And. Over. And. Over. And. Over. And. Over. Rinse. And. Repeat.”

Alex almost sounds apologetic when she responds. “That… was over two years ago, Jonas.”

“Oh,” he says.

“Yeah,” she replies. “Oh.”

“This. Is. New.” The void crackles with the intensity of its word, a mere comment, an appraisal, yet so powerful Jonas half-expects the sky to thunder with the words. There’s a grating burst of static, filling up the cavernous area, bouncing off the walls of the cave and the walls of Jonas’ skull, and he feels Ren’s fingers tighten on his shoulder. He grabs him in return, pulls him closer, as though the ground itself is about to crack open and drag them a chasm apart.

The voices continue, oblivious. “As. Old. As. Is. Good,” it says, and then, “Rewind.”

“You need to go,” Alex instructs, her voice firm, hard, cold. “I can’t trap you in here. Not after –”

“Come through the portal!” Jonas yells over the static. A light is flashing. Among the murky green, a submarine crashes onto the rocks. Ocean. “Alex, just jump!” A flash of blue. A flash of red. A flash of hope. A glitch, and it’s all dragged back.

“I can’t,” she screams, and Ren’s flashlight flickers and dies. The noises are rising on a crescendo. Static, crackle, white noise, a radio frequency that groans and a radio frequency that screams. Something creaks, like the Titanic ripping apart from the centre, (but Jonas would never admit he knows that sound) – but there’s another sound, a familiar sound, a haunting tune being thrown at him in his mother’s voice and the soft bed of his memory, and he wants to cry but there’s too much noise for him to know if it’s even really, truly there –

And in the void above him, the U.S.S. Kanaloa hits the seabed – U.S.S. what? – the submarine smacks against the rocks, and implodes, and reorganises itself into atoms on the wrong side of the door. Someone is screaming. Jonas clings onto Ren, and cries out to Alex, a desperate bid, a promise, an IOU, inscribed on a letter that starts, DeAR EDWARDS iSLANd, yOuR oRIGINAL NAMe IS ABnAKI –

“Please,” he tries, voice scarcely a whisper in the tornado around him. Alex, faithful friend that she is, hears him.

“I can’t –” she gasps, and he wonders what the pressure must be like on her, whether the same screams are echoing in her head, the same glitches are crackling in the corner of her eye, the same oppressive headache is pounding in her skull – “If I come back, Michael dies – I can’t kill him again. I can’t do it again. I can’t lose him again.” A heartbeat, real and alive. “The universe doesn’t let us both live through this night, okay, Jonas? I tried. God damn it, I tried!”

Jonas tries to respond. He tries to tell her, it’ll be okay, we can figure it out. We always figure it out. But, truth be told, they have never figured it out. Memories come flooding back like a burst dam, Alex, Jonas, Alex, Jonas, Alex – blue hair, wide grin, jumping over chasms and tuning her radio, red-eyed and twitching, brown-eyed and smiling, grabbing his hand and dragging him through the abyss.

Alone, a limp body in the cave, Jonas cradling her as he carries her out of there. Not dead. Asleep, but not dead. Hands, tightening around her sleeping form as they wait for the ferry home. Absently tugging a twig from her ponytail as they wait in silence. Awake, on the ferry, with her arm around his waist and his arm around her shoulders, leaning into each other, a quiet exhilaration that they’re alive.

Memories that don’t exist because they haven’t happened yet, won’t happen ever. Her memories. His perspective.

Ghosts, screaming at him, because he wasn’t supposed to remember and she wasn’t supposed to exist. A plan, ruined. Ninety-seven dead people that would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids. He never even watched Scooby Doo as a child.

Another hand grips his shoulder, not Ren’s, bigger than Ren’s, and he feels himself buckle into the touch and fall into sturdy arms, ready to catch him. A warm voice that feels like home for a brief moment, but not his moment, Alex’s moment, as Michael tells her, “You know, the universe also didn’t let you exist in the first place, yet here we are.”

Alex is crying. Jonas can’t see her, or hear her, but he knows she is crying and he believes he might be too, encased in Michael’s grip, firm and careful all at once. His gaze is thrown to the side and he sees Clarissa and Nona, here to help, propping Ren up as he, too, fights wave after wave of memories and regrets and pain.

He thinks this might be Alex’s pain, exploding out from a portal that shouldn’t be open in memories that shouldn’t exist. “What if you die?” Alex asks, and Jonas feels Michael’s chuckle vibrate through his chest.

“I’m your big brother,” he tells her. “That’s what I’m supposed to do for you. Besides,” and how does he sound so calm, so normal, how can he embrace his own demise like a particularly dull movie ending – and all Jonas can think is that Alex was wrong, clearly, sometimes the guy does die at the end – “besides, dying sounds a whole lot better than never existing in the first place.”

Michael reaches a hand out to the portal.

Slowly, the portal reaches back.

Chapter Text

Here’s Alex’s problem.

When she reaches out, she’s not reaching from one dimension to the other, glitching between time and space to leave the universe constructed for her here and return to the world she belongs in. Because, in every time loop, in every moment she falls through the portal, out of the cave and into the bottom of the ocean to watch the U.S.S. Kanaloa crash into the seabed, she falls into a new existence. A new dimension.

It took her a while to realise this, but there is a stream of thirty, forty, fifty universes trailing behind her. Each of them, specially designed for her. Each of them, detailing the same few months, over and over again. Each of them, tripping her over to fall right back into autumn, when the trees are brown and the air is musty and she has to pick up her new brother, Jonas, to go take the ferry over to Edwards Island –

It might make a girl feel special, to know that entire dimensions have sprung into existence because she was stupid enough to tumble into them. All of them are pulled like puppets on strings to bend to the will of the ghosts.

On her sixth, or seventh, or maybe even eighth rewind, she fully realised this. It clicked into place from the beginning. Of course, she tried to tell her friends. Of course, none of them believed her. So she stepped into the play she was always destined to act, knowing the script by heart and holding onto the only prop she ever needed in the form of a small, plastic radio.

The ghosts said, “You again?”

She replied, “Me again.”

Once, she tried not to go to the island at all. The ghosts didn’t like that. In fact, they wrenched a hole in spacetime open right in her living room, and she watched as her mom convulsed, red-eyed, as Jonas was ripped apart from the inside, as every photo of Michael on the shelf was smashed one by one. She screamed at them to stop, and they stopped, laughed, rewound.

She went to the island.

And then, every time, she leaves the island. She wakes up on a boat. Sometimes Jonas carries her there, sometimes Michael. Occasionally Jonas hates her too much to talk to her about it, but normally he’s there when she wakes up, ready to help her, grin at the camera with her, hold her. Ren holds onto Nona, and then he doesn’t, and then he does, and then he doesn’t.

Clarissa leans into Michael. Clarissa leans into no one. Clarissa doesn’t exist. Clarissa leans into Michael.

And then the world continues as it should – college choices, bad grades, horrific nightmares. The TV flares up in static when a storm hits around February, and every time, Alex panics. Jonas presses a kiss to her hair and reminds her it’s not real, they got out and they’re free, and she nods, pretends she believes him, pretends she isn’t waiting for the world to glitch back on itself and land on the ferry port doorstep.

Once, she shook her head, told him, we didn’t get out. We’re still stuck and you’re too fucking blind to see it. He asked what she meant and she chickened out of telling him, in case it ruined everything, in case it dragged him right back into the horror show with her. Then, he carefully, awkwardly started to tell her about some things he was reading online about PTSD? Have you heard of it? It’s this mental illness, about – like, if you’ve been through a traumatic experience or whatever, and –

Eventually, the world resets back to Edwards Island. April 14^th, when her therapist suggested scrapbooking with all the photographs of her and her friends that she’d built up over the years. She glues in the picture taken of all five, six, five, four, five of them on the ferry, and starts writing down what happened. Everything that happened.

It feels tacky, and wrong, and then she writes, what happened on the island used to pop into my head every single day, and then every other day, and then a week went by and I realised I hadn’t thought about it at all.

It feels tacky, and wrong, and she’s been here seventeen times over, and then she writes, what happened on the island won’t leave my head. I think about it every day. It’s been half a year since I was last there. I’m never getting out of here.

It feels tacky, and wrong, and she’s been here forty-three times over, and she throws her pen at the wall.

But now, as Michael reaches out to her, and she reaches back, she finds herself toppling through not one portal, but dozens, seventeen, forty-three, eight-nine, every lifetime she’s ever lived, every sacrifice she’s ever made and every time loop she’s ever glitched through. She is torn apart into atoms that haphazardly rearrange themselves on the other side of every portal only to get dragged apart again.

— HAVE YOU EVER STARED INTO NOTHING, AND MOVED WITH IT, AND FELT APART IN IT?

She’s so close to pushing through, the tears wet on her face, the heat of the stupid green fucking triangle washing over her, and her fingertips are stretching at the layer of time that coats the final barrier –

The world flashes into white, and she falls away, crashing into a moment that never existed before.

Horn Lake.

“Anyway,” Michael is saying, “this place doesn’t really have a shallow end, as you know, but I’m pretty sure I picked the safest spot for us to start off in. It’ll be fine! No need to look like that.”

“Like what?” Alex says defensively, automatically taking root in the scene around her. Her hands grip the knotted rope, floating in the water uncomfortably. She kicks her feet experimentally, and feels the weeds from the bank brush against her leg.

Somehow, in every time loop she’s lived through, she’s never come here. It was something she didn’t know she needed to be grateful for.

The day is exactly as she remembered – sunny, but not cloudless, the light breeze rippling over the water. Michael’s jacket is hanging on a tree branch nearby, above a pile of their clothes. Alex is still wearing her tee and it clings to her, wet, tight, billowing out in the water only to stick back to her stomach. Michael himself pushes away from the bank, gliding effortlessly towards the middle of the lake.

Alex’s grip on the rope tightens instinctively, while her mind screams at her.

All this time. All this time she had to learn how to swim and she never did. All this time, flinching away from anything deep enough to drown in, because going into the bathtub was scary enough, but a swimming pool, a lake, an ocean, these triggered a real panic inside her. There were always more people there to drown, more people she couldn’t save if they needed her. No, Alex never learned how to swim, and no, she wouldn’t let anyone else swim in her presence.

Everyone accepted it. It was fair enough, that a girl who watched her brother drown would be scared of open water. Nobody wanted to be there to challenge the inevitable panic attack that followed the weightlessness of floating in water, so nobody tried to make her learn to swim.

She opens her mouth, the warning on her lips, don’t duck under, Mike, you’re gonna drown, Mike, but her brother stops her before she can start. “Look,” he continues, “I’m gonna go all the way down to the bottom, then I’ll come all the way up to the top, and you can see for yourself that there’s nothing to be scared of.”

“Wait, Michael, no –”

She’s interrupted by the small splash of water that follows him ducking his head under. Alex swallows her fears and follows him under, ducking her head below the surface of the water and prying her eyes open against the sting that hits them as she watches Michael touch the bed of the lake. She sees the net, too. She sees him spin to push off from the bottom, sees the cloud of dust that rises and the net wrapping round his ankle, holding him down under the surface. She sees his eyes widen in shock.

She clings to the rope as he begins to struggle.

Michael’s first mistake, she knows now, with decades of wisdom under her belt, was that he didn’t take a big enough breath to sustain him for the length of time he needed, since he only thought it would be a quick kick down to the bottom and another back to the surface. His second mistake was that he tried to swim up again and pull his foot free by force. This only tightened the knot around his ankle. His third mistake, and each has been so carefully categorised in Alex’s mind as she ran over the event, again and again, lying awake at night and wondering where it all went wrong, was that he tried to undo the knot when it had already been tightened too much instead of ripping through the net’s frayed strings.

His last mistake, of course, was thinking that Alex was a brave enough – selfless enough – person to help him.

Alex doesn’t have time to think. Alex doesn’t have time to pretend she knows how to swim. Alex doesn’t have time to call for help because they’re the only two around.

Alex doesn’t have the energy to remember this is only a memory, because from everything she’s seen before, memories can change.

She pulls herself down to the bottom of the lake, dragging herself with weak, pathetic kicks and clinging onto the reeds that grow from the bed, eyes still forced open against the dirty water, heart pounding as she holds her breath. She snatches one of the stones at the bottom, a thin one, not sharp but sharp enough, and begins to hack at the frayed rope of the net. Michael hesitates, and then joins her, not seeking out a rock but tugging the frayed strings apart with his bare hands.

Underwater. At the bed. Her mind flashes, and she’s at the Kanaloa, Clarissa being wrenched apart in front of her very eyes. Her lungs are water, her mouth is water, her screams are water, and the submarine creaks above her, and the portals crackle, and the ghosts laugh.

Her fingers slip on the rope. The panic is coming back, and, wow, Alex, great timing, fucking stellar – but she tries and fails to grab the next fraying piece, hands shaking as she hangs suspended in the water.

She takes a deep breath, forgetting that in the real world, you can’t do that in a lake, and her mouth floods with dirty water. Her lungs are opened, and she freezes, wide-eyed and ready to die, at the bottom of Horn Lake. Just as she always should have.

An arm wraps around her waist, dragging her up to the surface, breaking through triumphantly and tugging her up the bank, onto the grass. She retches violently, the watery contents of her lungs, her stomach, everything, all spilling out onto the dirt beneath her.

“Alex?” says a voice. Michael’s voice. A hand rests warmly on her back; a thumb massages soothing circles against the top of her spine. “Come on, kiddo, it’s fine, I’ve got you, you’re fine.”

At some point, the retching turns into sobbing, and Michael heaves her up to cradle her against him. She wraps her arms around his neck, childlike, burying her face into his damp shoulder as she cries. “We got out,” she mumbles, slightly muffled as she presses her face to his shirt. “You got out.”

“Hell yeah, I did,” he replies encouragingly, still holding her in a tight embrace. “We both did. That’s a one hundred percent success rate on not drowning, you know that?” He leans his chin against the top of her head. “And I totally thought I was a goner for a moment, too. The rope wouldn’t budge. So, uh, thanks for the idea of just – ripping it.”

Gently, he pries her away from him, holding her at arm’s length. “Alex? You did good.”

“You –” She hiccups, and then coughs again, watery residue still spitting from her lips. “You suck, I can’t believe you’d just –”

He snorts, and ruffles her hair, before his attention turns to the chunk of net still tied around his ankle. “Man, am I gonna get a couple of good nightmares outta this one,” he mutters, and gets to work on removing the string.

Alex can feel the world begin to slip away from under her. “You have… no idea,” she says, before the world dustily fades into white, before she’s nudged back into the present day.

Chapter Text

Alex wakes up to the sound of voices, her head pillowed in someone’s lap and the soft rocking of the world beneath her that she’s long since come to expect. The ferry. She pushes herself up, silently, coming face to face with Michael by her side and the others close by. She counts them, as she tends to, now, wondering how many of her friends she’s actually coming home with today. Michael. Clarissa. Ren. Nona. Jonas. The gang’s all here.

“Heeey,” Michael starts, “how’re you doing, Sleeping Beauty?”

“A girl passes out one time and she gets called Beauty?” she asks. “Man, I should fall unconscious more often.” He nudges her shoulder and she nudges him back, settling down into her seat as the other members of the group gather round them.

Ren starts. “Hey! Alex! Do you remember – everything?”

Alex hesitates before answering, because she’s not entirely sure what she’s supposed to be remembering. She never is. “Do… you?” she asks in return, tugging the red jacket closer around her shoulders. “I’m pretty sure I…”

“Whatever you did down in the cave,” Ren says, and Alex’s stomach drops, “you totally kicked the ghosts’ asses. We got out. Michael carried you back to the boat.”

A sudden wave of bitterness washes over her. She nods at Ren’s words, standing up and moving to walk upstairs on the ferry. It’s not entirely certain what she’s going upstairs for, but she needs a moment, needs space, needs to get over the unbearable disappointment roiling in her gut. She feels like she might be sick.

This time, she thought she was out. She really thought she was out.

Horn Lake. The radio to another dimension. The portal that opened, the one that’s never opened before. Years of contacting the dimension where it all began with balled-up letters, more cryptic than Maggie Adler’s phonetic alphabet, with text after text sent through, conversations had, conversations lost…

Yeah, she thought it was different. And in half a year’s time, she’s going to glitch right back to where she started. As usual.

Alex doesn’t remember sitting down on the top deck until Jonas appears at the top of the stairs, much taller than he should’ve been, and she realises she’s on the floor. “Hey,” she says, emptily, too tired to bother pretending she feels okay.

“Hi,” he replies, feet shuffling awkwardly for a moment before he makes the bold decision to step inside. “I, um, I just wanted to say… I remember everything. More of everything than the others. Everything-everything.”

“What?” Alex asks, sitting up.

Jonas moves into the top deck properly, now, thumbs jammed into his pockets nervously, and he takes a seat next to Alex against the wall. “Nobody else does,” he continues, nervous, as though he’s well aware that this is one of the first real conversations he and Alex have shared in this life – but comfortable, too, as though he is aware that there is an entire ocean of memories between them left untouched by the real world. “There are… as far as I’ve figured out, there are three different versions of last night, right?”

Alex thinks over the time loops, returning to the same point over and over again, and wants to tell him, no, Jonas, there are a thousand. She just nods. “Right.”

“The one where Michael doesn’t exist,” he starts, slowly, and Alex’s heart jumps in her chest. “The one where you don’t exist. And the one where both of you exist – also known as the one that actually happened. Right?”

“Right,” she breathes, eyebrows drawing together in confusion. “How – how are you remembering this?”

He shrugs. “I dunno, there was some – weird mind-meld stuff going on back at the portal. It’s like, I remembered everything you remembered, from your point of view, while I was still me. And then as soon as the portal closed up and we all woke up on the beach and it was back to normal, I still remembered everything. It was just – from my perspective, this time. Me opening the rift must’ve made me remember everything, I guess.”

Alex slumps, then, her head knocking back against the wall as she draws her knees to her chest and hugs them. She’s sure the relief is etched into her face, and she takes this moment to lean against Jonas, because she can, because he’s here and he’s not going to glitch away. Probably.

“I don’t remember all the loops you went through,” he admits. “Which – uh – it sounds like there were a few.”

“There were a few,” she agrees. “But – you remember pulling me out of the rift?” She feels him nod, his cheek pressed against her hair, and her exhale is shakier than she’d like to admit. “Okay. Cool. That’s good.”

Neither of them talk for a long time, just stare at the wall together in silence. Alex wonders if Jonas might’ve fallen asleep – not that she’d blame him. Edwards Island is a sleepless night that leaves them all zombified, dead-eyed and stumbling into their respective beds to talk about what they went through when they’re energised enough to talk again. Adrenaline wears off.

Only, Jonas isn’t asleep, and he proves it by asking, “Do you remember what happened last night? Like – the actual last night. The one everyone else remembers, with Michael.”

“No,” she says, and then pauses, and then snorts gracelessly. “No, I don’t. I’ve got a million nights on Edwards Island in my head and none of them are the one that actually matters.” She snorts again, which turns into a giggle, which dissolves into proper laughter. “God, the universe just hates me!”

Jonas is grinning when she lifts her head, and he adjusts his beanie, rolling his eyes a little. “Anyone told you you’re… kind of a drama queen?” he asks, which is followed by a soft ow when she punches his arm. “Okay. Okay. I can tell you the basics, if you want. We all still went down to the beach, but Clarissa was chill, so there were no campfire confrontations or anything. Still went into the cave, still opened the rift, still went and found everything about Maggie Adler… um, you and Michael went off, most of the time. I was sent back to Harden Tower with all the other benched players while you two tag-teamed saving the world together. You –”

“Aleeeeex! Jonaaaaaas!” Nona calls from downstairs. “We’re taking a group photo!”

“Coming!” Jonas calls back, and then turns to Alex. “It’s funny, like – I remember this. All of this. It already happened, the first time, when we knew each other and Michael was dead...” He hesitates. “Somewhere, in some universe, there’s a picture of us and he’s not there.”

Alex huffs, climbing to her feet exhaustedly. “Jonas, in a million universes, there are a million pictures where he’s not there. Trust me. I had to stick ’em all into my scrapbook and everything.”

“I didn’t take you as the scrapbooking type,” Jonas replies easily, heading towards the stairs and beginning to descend to the deck below. “Actually – no, wait, I remember that, too. I do. It was after we all got off the island, and…” He pauses on the bottom step, looking back at Alex in confusion. “Did we live through the whole future before it… you know, rewound itself?”

Alex quirks an eyebrow. “Jonas, do you happen to remember everything up until April 14^th?”

“Your… birthday, right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, you saw the future – well. A future. I don’t think it’s ours, anymore.” Alex drops onto the deck heavily, the fatigue evident in her movements, and Jonas wraps an arm around her shoulder to keep her upright – not that either of them would admit to it. “That was when the ghosts reset, every time. I’d get a scrapbook for my 18^th from your dad, after my therapist recommended it, and I’d stick in this stupid picture we’re about to take, and then… boom. Back to Edwards Island.”

“Wow,” Jonas says quietly. “You’re – you’re gonna tell me about that more, okay? But for the moment, you’re gonna smile. This is gonna be the best scrapbook photo you’ve ever glued in. Deal?”

With a snort, Alex replies, “Deal,” and falls into line with all their waiting friends.

“No smoking in my room,” Alex says, just as Jonas’ hand twitches to his pocket. He pauses, surprised, as she drops the scrapbook on her desk. “And before you ask, no, I didn’t see that in some Groundhog Day bullcrap. At four-fourteen in the afternoon, Jonas is going to light a cigarette. I just know you. And I know you when you get nervous.”

He crosses his legs where he’s sat on her bed. “Who said I’m nervous?”

“I did,” she replies, opening the scrapbook. The pile of photographs are waiting on the desk beside it, and she counts through the pages, giving each photo a page that she can return to and glue it in later. For the moment, she wants to start with the most important one. “And, you know, I’ve got a lot more to lose than you do, right now. This is a little selfish, Jonas.”

With a snort, Jonas leans back against the headboard, eyebrows raised. “I’m sorry, Alex, my queen,” he responds. “I’ll send positive vibes your way, or whatever it is you want me to do.”

She grins at him. “Better.” Then, with a deep breath, she glues in the photo from the ferry.

Nothing happens. So far, so good, and her gaze is now drawn to the empty page beside it, waiting to be filled with… answers, she supposes. “Hope this works,” she mutters, and begins to write.

Before we left, I told my mom I was spending the night at a friend’s house. When I got back, I didn’t see any reason to change that story. And… you know what, I still don’t.

The island did one good thing, forcing Ren and Nona together, which is nice, because they’re still together, actually. Though, they go to different schools, now. Trying out the long-distance thing, I guess.

Michael and Clarissa got their apartment in New York. I have no idea how they managed it, but it worked out. I talk to Clarissa… pretty rarely, but Michael comes back to visit often enough. He tells the story about how he ‘nearly drowned at Horn Lake’ all the time. Everyone calls him overdramatic for it.

Jonas and I are still here. He remembered everything I remembered – well, not everything, but… the stuff that mattered. It was weird, at first, and we both sometimes forget that we’re not step-siblings, which is strange for everyone, but I think they just put it down to us being really good friends. Michael once asked if I have a crush on him. It was… the worst experience of my life.

Alex takes a deep breath.

What happened on the island doesn’t leave me. I don’t know if it leaves Jonas, or any of the others. I’m actually kind of too scared to ask. I remember it all the time; whenever I get a headache, or the TV bursts into static in that one February storm, or I get déjà vu about literally anything, I remember it. And it’s hard to move on when half of you still thinks you’re stuck in a time loop. But… hey. I’m working on it.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with my life yet. I’m just waiting around to figure out if I have one, first. I’ll keep you posted.

She dates the picture in the corner of the page. Jonas hasn’t said anything the entire time she was writing, and she glances up at him now, heart pounding, palms sweaty. His head raises fractionally.

“Is now when you would, uh…”

“Last sentence,” she replies faintly. “It was always in the middle of the last sentence.” Her hands are shaking, and she feels a headache pressing between her eyes but she knows it’s just an overactive imagination with far too much ammunition built up over the years.

Jonas shuffles off the bed, hesitant in stepping over to glance down at the page. “Well,” he starts, “good riddance, Edwards Island.” His gaze flickers to hers, and there’s a tiny grin forming at the corners of his lips, and Alex can’t help but mirror it with her own.

She picks up her pen, replying, “Couldn’t have said it any better myself,” and scribbles in an additional message at the bottom of the page.

GOOD RIDDANCE, EDWARDS ISLAND.